After reading some doomsday fiction and Stiff, I’m looking for some books that would be more of a pick-me-up. I attempted to start ‘The Secret’, but found it so hokey and New-Agey that I couldn’t get past the 1st few pages. I guess I’m looking for ‘positivity for the intellectual reader’ type books, if that makes sense. (fiction or nonfiction) Any recommendations?
Black Swan Green. Not Positive all the way through, but positive outcome.
And as it’s a David Mitchell book it’s very intellectual (at least for my brain)
Pride and Prejudice
Well, right off the top of my head… If you want light reading (essentially, sit-coms in print) where everything works out all right in the end, try P. G. Wodehouse.
Jennifer Chiaverini writes books and they center around quilting. They are very postive as in the fact the characters all start out as doom and gloom and learn life lessons. Even my husband liked them so you don’t have to be into quilting, though I imagine it would make it more interesting, I’m not into quiliting but anyway they are quite good. Maybe a little too “Polyana,” but they are a good easy read on the bus or say plane.
You don’t have to read them in order but it helps as I didn’t read them in order and certain characters like Sylvia change a bit and while it’s not essential to the plot it may leave you wondering things like “Why did Sylvia say that?”
If you’re prepared to read eight books - The Harry Potter series has an uplifting ending.
There’s an eighth Harry Potter book?
WHERE?
How about the cat in the hat? Bound to put a smile on anyone’s face.
I’m finding it pretty tough to think of uplifting positive books - I guess it’s more common for authors to march down the dark harrowed road of the human condition. Some random ones:
100 years of solitude by GG Marquez is a majesterial, inspiring read.
Touching the void by Joe Simpson. If you like novelisations of real events then this is the Daddy of mountaineering books. Makes you want to head for Peru and take on Siula Grande.
Anything by Richard Brautigan - ‘Dreaming of babylon’ is a good one. Very easy reader, very funny.
If you want some heavy shit - Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysees is the most positive and real piece of prose you’ll ever read. There is the small matter of the 900 or so pages that go before it though 
On the Wodehouse tip - The short story master Saki is a brilliant and very cruel satirist who writes about the same dim English aristocracy. Deeply cynical, but so biting it always gives me a (sort of) positive feeling.
That depends entirely on the reader. That last book was pretty uneven, I thought, and if I had discovered a thousand dollars on the last page, I still probably would only have called it an OK book.
I find “A Room with a View” to be pretty uplifting, especially for an author that wrote “Maurice,” a tale of doomed homosexual love. “A Room with a View” is light and amusing, though.